Elite Dangerous developer David Braben has shared the studio’s reservations about enabling cross play as the game moves from PC to Xbox One (and PlayStation 4 later). The thing is, they may be partly mistaken.
Here’s what Braben had to say when asked about this:
I think the challenges for us, which sort of fights against it is we’ve also said that we’ll continue to do updates across all platforms, and what we didn’t want was PC updates to be held up for whatever reason, like if there’s a delay on another platform.
Braben is alluding to the matter of platform certification, a dealbreaker in making this sort of thing happen for other games as well.
However, they may be able to get around this, at least partly, by enrolling in the ID@Xbox program for Xbox One and Windows 10. Of course, PC players have it on Steam now, but with the new features Microsoft has promised with DX12, they can simply publish the game on the Windows 10 App store, and enable cross play there.
What do you think? Is the new ID@Xbox program worth the trouble for this? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.
